A Pilgrim’s Digression

It may not look it, but I have made some pretty drastic changes in my blog since it came back on-line last week. The blog may still look (mostly) the same, but the engine that drives it is totally new.

I am now creating my blog with WordPress. Primarily, I’ve made this change in the belief that WordPress offers better spam fighting tools. Now that the blog is officially open to the public, it will be interesting to see if that belief proves true or not.

I suspect I will have less of a problem with spam, if only because WordPress allows for comment moderation. This means before a comment is posted, it goes into a queue for me to verify and approve. Currently, I don’t think this will apply to those of you who have left comments previously. You should be able to see your comments immediately.

However, until you start leaving comments and I see how the software works (or does not work), I don’t really know what is going to happen. You may be required to register before you can leave a comment. As irksome as it may be to have to register with yet another website, you only have to do it once, after which you will be free to post without any approval process on my end of things.

It’s a shame the extraordinary ends to which spam forces us. As we try out this new software, let me know if you notice anything that is broken.

You’ll notice that there is a “contact” link in the upper left corner, where my list of blogs used to be when this blog was powered by b2Evolution. The “Archives” link just beneath it doesn’t work yet; I’m still working on a live updating archives page. In the meantime, you can use the archives in the sidebar.

Right now, WordPress lacks the multiple blogs feature of b2Evolution; this is its primary drawback. However, after some thought I decided I didn’t really need multiple blogs…and maybe, ultimately, multiple blogs are just confusing anyway. I know I found that I often missed posts from other brooders because I didn’t think to look on one of their other blogs, or else I didn’t have the RSS feeds for all their blogs.

To compensate for WordPress’s lack of multiple blog functionality, I cleaned up my categories. I had rendered categories effectively useless in b2Evolution by having so many of them, with multiple sub-categories. I’ve trimmed the tree of categories, and if you scroll down the sidebar past my list of links, you’ll see that I’ve reduced categories to just a handful. My “Film Blog” I have categorized under the term “Film Reviews.” My strange, erotic dreams are categorized as “Only in Dreams.” My “Fiction” blog is now under the category “Fiction” and so on.

Another reason I made the move to WordPress was its ability to import from other blogging tools, such as Blogger and Livejournal and b2Evolution. I saw this move as a way to consolidate my blog here at sodsbrood with my Blogger blog. The import from both Blogger and b2Evolution went surprisingly well, and now, for the first time and with only a little manual labor, I’ve got all my posts going back to my very first post in March 2003 under one roof.

You can go to the archives and read my posts from March, April, June, and July of 2003, during the first months of the Iraq War. And might I suggest you could begin by reading the following untitled post from April 8, 2003. Considering I still considered myself a Republican at the time, this post is rather startling.

So, in conclusion, I’m looking forward to starting anew. I don’t think the change will be anything too daunting for either of us. If you do encounter problems either registering or posting comments, please let me know.